Goal Posts

We spent some time in Maui and Kauai thinking about where to start our blog, and we both thought we should start with our “goals.” Where do we see ourselves in nine months? What do we want to have accomplished? What do we care about?

And so we began to piece it together, starting with what we cared about, backtracking toward the sorts of tangible things we might tackle while we were on the road. Experiencing new places, teaching ourselves career-ready skills in our spare time, learning languages, seeing friends, etc. But as our list of objectives came together, we started to catch ourselves reflected in it—two type A people sticking to what they knew, trying to analyze our way through the ambiguity of a lifetime.

We’ve found compromise for our ambition in a simpler goal: experiment with how we want to live. As we embark on the much longer journey of life together, we want to get perspective on the choices we make and the implications of those choices on our health and happiness. On this trip we will tip the scales between work and play, planning and spontaneity, fast and slow, directed and random, back and forth, until we find the balance that fits us. 

So no, there is no list of travel objectives; we think such a list would be self-defeating. And yes, the post is already giving Alex some anxiety as it echoes with the emptiness of our plans. But hey, that emptiness is fine, conquerable and in itself, good. We’ll keep you updated as we start to fill it in. We will try to make future posts less cliché.

- A+C